


A Morning Like This One

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Coda, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-King of Attolia, Recovery, reference to canonical suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 08:16:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7214716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later in the same day of the final scene of "The King of Attolia," the Captain of the Guard comes to visit the former Secretary of the Archives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Morning Like This One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [an_english_girl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/an_english_girl/gifts).



There was rain in the afternoon, as there often was at this time of year.

Relius knew what time of year it was. He even knew the date, for the first time since he’d begged it from the jailer and nearly lost his mind when he discovered that only two weeks had passed since his arrest. Relius had let time go, then, as irrelevant. Until his queen visited him several nights ago, easing him back into the current of Time’s river from where he had been dallying in the shallows.

A cool breeze, scented with rain and earth and growing things, drifted in through the window that was across the room from Relius’s bed. It was nice, this room that he’d been moved to after the physician declared him well enough to leave the infirmary. It was open and airy, very different from the apartment he had occupied for so many years, with what he assumed would be a pleasant view of the Tustis Valley from the window. He thought he might get up, tomorrow or the next day, to test his strength and his theory about the window. He’d asked the serving girl who brought in his breakfast to open it for him that morning, startling the poor child so badly that she nearly dropped his tea, and then he’d asked her what day it was. 

Until this morning Relius hadn’t said a word to anyone who was not his physician or his sovereign since his convalescence began. It had surprised him somewhat to find that his voice worked as it had before; that his tongue still knew its way around necessary pleasantries; that his mouth remembered how to smile. He had no doubt that this news of his stringing a few words together to form queries and thanks had made its way to the queen by now, and it gladdened him. His queen might not be watching him with spies and informants anymore, but Relius knew that there was nothing in the world that could curtail the gossip of palace servants.

There was a flash that drew his eyes to the window, then a roll of distant thunder. Relius sighed, and wondered when he’d last had nothing better to do than lounge in his bed and listen to a storm. Lost in thought, he heard the sound of heavy boots outside his door only moments before the knock came, but he recognized the step.

“Well, Relius,” the Captain of the Guard said without preamble, coming into his room as though this was any of a hundred, hundred afternoons when he’d come to share the news of the day and a cup of wine between this duty and that. Relius noticed that he didn’t even look around to inspect the room, though he’d never been in it before.

“Well, Relius. You will never guess what happened today.”

“Won’t I?”

“No,” Teleus said drily. It was good to hear his voice, and Relius found himself smiling.

“Have you come to tell me that you’ve been brawling in the training yard?” Relius asked, looking significantly at the side of the captain’s neck where it was discolored by a large, fresh bruise that looked to have been left by the flat of a wooden practice sword.

“Not exactly.” Teleus grimaced and probed the spot gingerly, then dropped his hand to look intently at Relius. “I have come to tell you that today, the Thief of Eddis has become King of Attolia.” 

Relius held his placid expression, and Teleus narrowed his eyes. “You already knew.”

“Well,” Relius shrugged. “I didn’t know that it would be _today_.”

Teleus shook his head, exasperated as he ever was when he thought he was bringing Relius fresh news, and hooked his ankle around the leg of a chair, pulling it closer to Relius’s bed and dropping down onto it with a sigh. Relius, who’d grown used to long silences, noticed this one only after Teleus broke it.

“I’m sorry, Relius.” 

“For what?”

A bitter laugh. “So many things, old friend.”

Relius gave a rueful smile. “A sentiment with which I am well acquainted. For what are you sorry today, then?”

“That I did not come to see you sooner. I should have.”

Relius shook his head. In the weeks since his removal from the prison, he’d been in nearly perfect isolation, his only guests the ones who did not require his permission to enter. While he was still in the infirmary, he’d requested that anyone wanting to see him be sent away, but it didn’t surprise him that Teleus hadn’t even tried. 

On the day Relius was arrested, Teleus had forced his way into the room just as Relius lifted the phial to his lips. The captain’s face would have been the last thing he ever saw, had things gone as they should have; his face, which in that almost-final moment was a mask of anguish that stopped Relius’s heart as effectively as the poison he was poised to drink. It was that moment of hesitation which had been his undoing, allowing one of the guards to get close enough to knock the phial from his hands. He’d heard Teleus barking orders over his head, but Relius kept his eyes closed and didn’t look at him. Because Relius was sure that his clarity of insight had not failed him: for an instant, the anguish on Teleus’s face had been nothing other than that of a man suddenly confronted with the loss of a great friend. It was gone when next Relius caught sight of him, when Relius was on his knees with the poison still stinging his lips, sprawled on the dais after Teleus struck him for daring to address Attolia as _His Queen_. Neither was it there some time later, in a rare moment of lucidity that allowed him to recognize who it was that oversaw his torture.

“I would not have let you in before now,” Relius told him finally. “I was…not myself, for awhile. I have been living in a dream world, Teleus, for some time.”

“Let me guess,” his friend said, resting one booted ankle over his knee. “In this dream world — were there goats and a fountain and a study that faces east?”

Relius laughed, surprised that he still could. “Am I so transparent?”

“No,” Teleus answered, a strange look crossing his face. “You’re not.”

Relius watched him for a minute before he asked, “So tell me, how does a barbarian goatfoot come to be king over us all in the space of a day?”

Teleus pushed his chair back on two legs and smiled ruefully at Relius. Those had been Teleus’s own words, a year ago. For a time, Relius had been one of the few able to look past the captain’s so-called failure to protect their queen, and the two of them had spent long hours discussing the implications of the upcoming marriage. 

“You mean, how does a one-handed man steal a queen and a country out from under our noses?” Teleus asked.

“I mean, how have you come to bow your knee to the one-handed man who stole your queen and your country, and to do it with such conviction that you’ve come here to tell me about it while the memory is still fresh?”

Teleus shook his head. “It’s a story I would not have believed a year ago. Gods, not even a month ago. And even less would I have believed that it somehow begins and ends with a fool named Costis Ormentiedes.” 

“Foolish, perhaps,” Relius conceded. “But not a fool.”

“You know better than I.”

“I often do. But come, tell me this tale, this story of poor, foolish Costis and our reluctant little king. Oh, and by no means leave out the role of the noble and long-suffering Teleus,” Relius teased. Teleus shook his head, but he was smiling too. Relius settled himself back against his pillows and lifted a hand. “Go on. Tell me the story of the King of Attolia.”

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to Prinzenhasserin and zeebie for beta-reading, and to the mod for making this exchange happen!
> 
> The title is taken from this exchange at the end of King of Attolia:
> 
> Eugenides: Are you worried about my taste in revenge?  
> Teleus: Should I be?  
> Eugenides: Not for that. On the other hand, if you give me another morning like this one, I'll have you all packed up in chains and sold on the Peninsula as gladiators.  
> Teleus: No more mornings like this one, Your Majesty. I admit that I find them painful myself.


End file.
